I wonder if solar panels could be feasibly built by a society that had no access to oil and internal combustion. Seems like a useful skip if possible.
@mauve do you know much about physical batteries
@garbados very little. Just the basics of how batteries work for powering basic circuits.
@mauve imagine a water wheel turning a crank that raises a heavy stone. another system draws power from the potential energy of the suspended stone by lowering it.
now make the stone very big and you have a gravity battery. not portable, but very, very high capacity
@garbados My knowledge is a bit higher than that, maybe at the level of some of the types of chemicals and physical layouts. Is this related to the solar panels still or an altetnative to needing oil?
@mauve related to solar panels. you can turn force into current lots of ways, so if the supply chain that produces solar panels and their components is compromised / damaged / fails, you can still create an electric grid using force and natural phenomena
@garbados Ah fair fair. Yeah like hydro electric couls be abother good power source if we can manufacture everything without oil. I guess I just wonder if the next iteration of intelligent life after humans die off will have a good chance or not. They can probs scavange material from our ruins and trash but the lack of easy combustions worries me sometimes.
@mauve haha, yeah. humans don't understand their fortune, but they also don't understand how common infinity makes them.
but speaking of earth, octopi will have a hard time with metallurgy
@mauve see, here's the thing to me...
what humans have truly failed to do is to build an interspecies society of peers. corvids, smart as they are, do not have multitools stuck on the end of their arms. our differences mean we can do society on each other's behalf. crows can't do medicine, but they sure can talk, and it's our failing that we have not learned to listen.
so i'm not betting on a particular species to act as a successor. only by working together can they succeed where we failed.